 Today we're going, Dave and I are going to take team of presentation about this Sheboygan River pedestrian swing bridge that broke the news late last week about the city receiving a grant for 5.3 million. So we'll get into a little bit more details on the project, but in a high level, we're going to run through a couple of slides. This was originally proposed back, I think, in 2007. It's been in a number of years of planning documents and then kind of shelved, if you will, because there wasn't a lot of funding opportunities available until some recent Biden infrastructure grant funding. So the location for this bridge would be connecting the south pier to the riverfront district. So this would be connected in near the Parker Johns on the end of Virginia Avenue, where Virginia Avenue terminates into the Sheboygan River and then goes across to the south pier district, which was originally planned to have a bridge when that was designed back in the early 2000 era. So the infrastructure and the kind of promenade and stuff at the south pier district is already in place. So this has been a part of the city's planning efforts for a number of years. The image on the left shows the south pier design guidelines planned from 2003 that had a proposed connector across the river at that location. And then the Harbor Sender Master Plan phase three, which was adopted in 2007, also showed that as well, connecting the two sides of the river. So just to step back and give you a little bit of flavor for what was down there, some of you may recall this and seen this in the past, but these are old historic photographs of south pier before it was south pier. When it was coal yards and crude oil tanks and all of that kind of stuff. So this is a picture from about probably 1960s or so before it was developed. This is a more recent one, but you can see that it had its industrial use for a long time in the city saw vision and move forward. This is recently and then as early as a couple of years ago with the housing development. So the location that's proposed is the narrowest part of the river kind of in the middle of this image. So this is showing what that promenade on south pier at the top image looks like where the bridge would go. And then the image on this bottom kind of shows the from the river, the area where it would connect on both sides. So why this location? This is the narrowest part of the river at 150 feet. The, as I stated prior, the improvements to south pier have been planned for this edition talked about, it's been talked about extensively over the years or just wasn't a funding source to fund it. There's navigation channel limitations as being a US Army core of engineers, federal navigation channel that restricts some of the opportunities that might be out there to connect the two sides of the river the clearance envelope. And then this has some access points to the A Street Bridge for operation. So this is just an image showing the bridge. This isn't the final design. This is a concept plan, but the process will ultimately come out with some kind of final design. It's been 12 years since this was originally proposed. So there's probably some new innovations and technologies that can come into place. But the bridge will primarily stay open on a, most of the time it'll be open for boat traffic because that's one of the hindrances that the charter fishermen have shown over the years is that they don't wanna wait for the bridge to open. So the bridge would just have scheduled times to close 15 minutes on the hour or different dedicated timeframes but on a given day it would be open more than it would be closed. It would be just the opposite of what you think a bridge would function. Most people would think the bridge would be closed and then open for boat traffic but the boat traffic is pretty aggressive and needs to be kept that way, especially with the federal navigation channel. So this is just another image showing what that bridge would look like in the open position and the connection. So I just wanna, those of you that have been involved, we've worked on different connection issues through a number of planning efforts with the Harbor Center Business Improvement District and that's where the Route 42, the trolley for the shoreline metro came into place to try to connect the two sides of the river but we still hear over and over connection issues of people having to go through the A Street Rotary, the busiest rotary intersection in the city to get up to the downtown from the south pier. So with the huge investment on the south pier, it makes sense to try to connect these two sides of the river and especially with the amount of people that are coming in on a yearly basis to the tune of 70,000 to 80,000 people through the resort that are on the south pier. So David's gonna talk a little bit about the grant and some of the requirements and why this project was chosen and where we go from here. Thanks Chad, that was a nice recap of kind of the history of south pier and how we arrived at this and it's pretty interesting if you look at some of those old photos back from the 60s and 70s in terms of what that land was and its use and what it is today. It's pretty transforming. So let's talk about the grant in and of itself. It's very specific and that's why this project was chosen is because there's specific criteria. We hear, well, let's put the money towards roads. Well, that's not an eligibility criteria of the grant. When you go for federal grants, you look at the criteria in and of itself and then you look for projects such as this opportunity for the bridge and that's partly why the bridge hasn't been proposed or built is because when we look at our capital improvements, there's other priorities in terms of our existing infrastructure and needs that take precedent over it but when we have an opportunity for a grant to get federal funding that's gonna pay for a large, large portion of the project, now the project becomes feasible. So like I said, the grant is very detailed and now that we've been awarded the grant, it means it's gonna start a process and the process is gonna take several years. There's, again, it's a concept at this point. So we actually need to then work with the grant in the DOT to actually bring on a designer, look at the design, what makes the most sense? Is a swing bridge the best option? Is a lift bridge in this location? Is there an opportunity to shift it slightly to get it a little bit higher even so that boats may able to transport underneath it without needing to be raised as much? So there's opportunities to have that type of discussion. There's gonna be a lot of public input through this process and so again, that's just the beginning of the design. So as Chad mentioned, it came eligible through the Biden infrastructure process. So what were some of the requirements? Safety is a huge component of the grant eligibility and we talk about pedestrians and bicyclists that primarily are gonna be using this facility. Right now they're all being sent to the roundabout intersection at Aethan, Indiana as well as the Aishtree Bridge. The Aishtree Bridge has over 12,000 vehicles a day as well as the intersection. So it's very congested and very difficult to navigate if you're a pedestrian or if you're in a bicycle. Again, environmental sustainability. Environmental and sustainability is a big focus of the new infrastructure bill. Reducing greenhouse gases. So how can we do that? Well, that's one way is by reducing trips. If you're on self-peer or if you're on the riverfront and you wanna go to the other side today, it's either a well over a mile walk and about almost 20 minute walk or you hop in your car and you take the drive around. So again, we are in a non-attainment zone. What does that mean? Our air quality in Sheboygan County is not meeting the federal air quality standards. So being in a non-attainment zone put us in a higher score for that for this project because we're going to reduce emissions. Quality of life. Again, helping with the quality of life is promoting walkability and pedestrian bicycle-friendly options. It increases your walking score. Again, reducing the emissions. Promoting energy efficiency. Another aspect is the economy. Look at the economic development that has occurred on the self-peer district from the beginning, from 2003 to today. The slides themselves show the transformation in the millions of dollars of economic input and activity and development on that. This is only going to further spur economic development and competitiveness between the two sides, allowing easier access for visitors and residents to enjoy that area. Another aspect is state of good repair. Just means continue to do the good things in terms of maintenance that you're doing in your community and Sheboygan scores high in that. There's partnerships and collaboration. We've had partnerships with the bid and Chad's area in terms of downtown development and in the self-peer district. The other aspect was innovation. A swing bridge for pedestrian. There's very few in the country that actually have movable pedestrian only spans. Most of them are for traffic or for roads so the feds that were scoring this felt, hey, this is innovative, this is good. This is an area where we want to prove that the taxpayer dollars in infrastructure are going to be used wisely and this is an opportunity to demonstrate that type of innovation. They looked at the cost benefit. The total cost benefit was positive on this, looking at around $40 million of economic development over the lifespan. And it serves a specific population. Sheboygan is an area in the downtown area, does have its challenges with the underserved in the area. Yes, we have many new apartments but yet a lot of those areas surrounding those are in need and the census tracts within those areas qualified as well. So you put this all together and the project scored very high. So it was a nationwide competitive grant. We're actually funded and this is unique is we're considered a rural recipient even though we're an urbanized area but our area is urbanized under 200,000. So our urbanized area is between 50 and 200,000 so that qualifies as a rural urbanized area. Some of the other projects that were funded are only four in the state. The other three were Potawatomi community. There was a multimodal safety connected project, the city of Beloit, also again, pedestrian and bicycle accommodations and as well as the Oneida Nation Bus Garage. So we applied for a grant of 5.3, roughly almost 5.4 million and our match will be at the end of all this will be right around 1.3. Now there's all sorts of possible matches of this. It's not just necessarily gonna be funded with city funds. There's, this is a federal grant so there's an opportunity to use state grants as a match in this. CMAC, which is Congestion Mitigation Air Quality. It's a grant program that only a few counties in the entire state qualify because of our air quality. Sheboygan's one of them and we just recently are using a CMAC grant to upgrade our traffic signal modernization for better traffic flow to help reduce emissions as well. So there's an opportunity to use that. There's other grants with the DNR and other DOT. The CDBG as well as this is in a TID and I believe TID 17. So we're gonna continue to work on this. Again, we, this is very early. This is exciting news that we were a recipient of this award and there's a lot of things that will be brought before this board and this common council as we progress along this path. But it's again, a great step in the beginning of a long, long proposed project. So as we get more information from the DOT we will keep everyone informed. We will need to take a look at the grant requirements as well as some of the design team and having public engagement and how we will manage that as well. This is a DOT project. So we're familiar with doing many DOT projects and they are lengthy in process and that's a good thing because there's a lot of things we wanna make sure we have good community input. So again, some renderings. There's a model down on the first floor as you come into City Hall as well. And I guess Chad and I are here to answer any questions if you have any this evening. All right, thank you Director Bebel and Director Palschek.